Your Awakened Nature Is Right There
Guided Nondual Meditation by Michael Taft
Hello and Welcome! I’m Michael Taft, and we’ll be doing the guided meditation tonight as usual. I think practically everyone’s already been here, but for those who haven’t been here, as usual, you can follow along with the guidance or not—it’s up to you. I can’t force you to do whatever you’re going to do in the privacy of your own mind, but in the public sea of this room, just attempt to remain rather motionless and quiet if you can, because people open up deeply in meditation, and that opening can be a little sensitive. We’re trying to try to keep it mellow. The meditation goes on for an hour, and then I will spew some nonsense at you guys, and then we’ll hand around a microphone, and if you want to spew your own nonsense back at me, you’re welcome to do so. When we’re done with all that, we’ll meditate a little more at the very end, and that will be unguided. That’ll be the best part—it’s just like five minutes of quiet, so I always look forward to that.
Let’s start out chanting a little bit. We’re going to chant something very strange—we’ve never chanted this before—we’ll do the seed syllable LAM. This is the seed syllable for the earth element. It’s, in a way, a seed syllable for Ganesh, the elephant-headed deity who shows up in both Hindu and Buddhist practice quite a bit. It’s just a little grounding before we blast off. So normally we just blast off with our seed syllable chant, but tonight we’ll ground with our seed syllable chant. It’s not hard, it’s just lam, and so, as usual, I’ll have a certain pitch, you find your own pitch, and I’ll breathe at certain spots, but you breathe whenever you want. The main thing is just relax, let go, you don’t need your mind to do this in any way. The mind is not involved, your thinking mind, just feel the energy of the chant, okay? So let’s begin.
[chanting] Lam, Lam, Lam
Feeling the energy of the chant like a pile of rocks, right? It’s very grounding, very stabilizing, very centering, right down in the root chakra. Beginning with that kind of fundamental stabilization opens us up for the opportunity to do some stuff that we don’t do that much in here, but I feel like doing tonight, so, if you haven’t eaten a ton of food recently, and you know how to do bhastrika breathing, you can start doing that now. Otherwise, I’ll show you how to do it, which is essentially you’re gonna move your diaphragm up and down, or your stomach in and out—kind of evenly, in like a pant if your mouth was open, but you’re doing it with your nose. Okay, so it’s like this [demonstrates]. Everybody see how to do that? You want it to be even, not strenuous. Don’t do it if it’s strenuous; make it nice and easy. What we’re doing is raising energy, and you’ll feel it, so we’re going to do it for a little while, but only do it as fast as you want, and only as much as you want, so adjust your dose to be good for you.
If you want to give it a little extra oomph, you can, with each breath, be mentally saying the word OM and kind of concentrating at your third eye.
Okay, let’s end that there, and then we’ll switch to either ujjayi breath or alternate nostril breathing. If you know how to do either of those and want to do those, go ahead. If you don’t know how to do alternate nostril breathing, you use your right thumb to close your right nostril, breathe in your left nostril, then close that left nostril, breathe out the right. Then breathe in the right, close the nostril, breathe out the left. So you’re always breathing in on one side and breathing out the other. Again, you can continue to do the mantra, if you wish on the breathing. If you’ve done this before, and you feel good about it, you can make the out-breaths quite a bit longer than the in-breaths—but again, if you’re not used to doing it, that’s probably not such a great idea. Because you’re using your hand at your face, sometimes people tilt their head forward, but you should be sitting up nice and straight.
The bhastrika breath really builds up a lot of energy, but we want to have our energy also be regulated, so doing the alternate nostril breathing is bi-hemispheric stimulation, and it really regulates that uplifted energy, so we’re not just full of energy, but it’s smooth. Now, because we started on a left nostril in-breath, keep going until you end with a left nostril out-breath, so that it’s balanced.
Good. Then just check in with how you feel. We both grounded and then raised energy, and then we regulated, or balanced, our energy. And from here, as we begin the more subtle part of the meditation, we simply set the thinking mind aside, to whatever extent you’re able to. Just let your thinking machine sit in the corner of your being there, and do not pay attention to it. Doesn’t matter if it’s thinking, we’re just not picking up or doing anything with any of the thoughts—they’re just background noise. Instead, where all our awareness is flowing, is just into openness and spaciousness, so we’re sitting like the sky.
There’s nothing to do to make awareness open and spacious—it’s already open and spacious when we’re not all caught up in thinking. It’s grabbing onto thoughts that makes our mind really narrow and tight. When we don’t grab onto them, it just opens up into this sky-like, boundless spaciousness. So just let it be boundless, spacious, awakeness, and if you find yourself grabbing onto the thoughts again, just set them back down. And if you grab onto thoughts again, just drop them again, come back to just being the sky.
What I want you to notice here is that you can, without using thought at all, it’s perfectly easy to sit and feel your body. So while awakeness, awareness, is like sky, notice this, let’s say, mountain, of the body that’s sitting there within the sky—tremendously stable, tremendously grounded. In some sense, even regal and elegant.
So, without engaging thought at all, just with awareness like the sky, just in a broad way, feel the body. We’re not focusing on it, we’re just noticing it in the sky. So let’s sit meditating like the sky, feeling this mountain of the body for a while here. And just feel your body. Every time the thoughts come up and try to gain your attention, just come back to feeling the body.
Now, if you want to, you can kind of feel the whole body all at once, or you can kind of go from area to area, but try not to get all narrow with it. It’s not like micro investigation. We’re staying loose and open and relaxed, not trying to focus hard on body sensation. You just want to feel it, stay with it.
Good. Now, as you’re continuing to just feel the body in the sky of awakeness, letting go of any engagement with thinking, notice, as part of this, the specific body sensation or sensations associated with breathing. So, still feeling the whole body, just notice the rising and falling of this wave of breathing that goes through the body. Letting it be very simple, very natural. Not trying to do anything with our breath now, but just being aware of its rhythmic, wave-like motion through our body.
Just feeling the breath wave coming and going in the overall feeling of body sensation, and really letting awareness rest with that. Not flitting back and forth to thinking, but just sitting with these body sensations.
Good. Now, something you may have already begun to notice is that at least some of that body sensation might feel kind of tingly, buzzy, energized, instead of feeling like a body part. It feels more like little dots that are moving, little energy charges that are buzzing around, and so if any part of this whole spectrum, this whole field of body sensation feels more like that, just give that a tiny bit more of your attention.
Again, not focusing hard on it, not trying to make anything out of it, not trying to imagine anything, but, just, if there’s parts of sensation that are fuzzy and tingly, just really give those a little bit more attention. For many people, it’s the hands and feet that they feel that first, for some people, it’s the mouth, but it can be anywhere, really. For some folks, it’s your whole body. And again, we’re not trying to do anything with that; we’re just noticing this energized, buzzy, flowing feeling in the body sensation, while remaining tremendously open like the sky, and not engaging with thought.
You may notice that the more you give a little extra attention to this energy feeling, this buzziness, this tingliness, it starts to spread a little bit—more areas feel that way. It can start to feel like—if it gets to a lot of areas—it can start to feel like the body, which previously we were feeling as being like a mountain, like a pile of rocks, starts to feel more like a beehive or something—it’s a lot of buzzy energy that feels good. Not buzzy in the negative sense, but that pleasant sense of energy all through the body. And also, that the outline of the body starts to become less distinct, more open, more relaxed, more foglike.
So let’s just sit with that for a little while. Again, not trying to make anything happen, just feeling what you’re feeling. You may notice, as part of this, just how good that feels in the body, even if in some parts of your body there are normal aches and pains; this feeling of the energy feels very pleasant. It’s a nice thing to pay attention to.
Notice if you’re lost in thinking, and that’s okay, just set that back down, and come back to feeling, just feeling. But if you’re tuning into the energy, you might notice that it’s getting more ubiquitous—more areas of the body feel like they’re buzzy and tingly. It might also feel stronger. You’re not trying to make it that way, but just paying attention to it tends to do that.
This buzzy tingliness is how the body experiences itself when it’s not being filtered, when the experience of the body is not being filtered through the mind. In the mind, we try to make it into an object, but in its own experience, it feels like an energy field. So the more that we let go of our ideas about the body, and just encounter the body, the more it feels like buzzy tingly aliveness. It’s just an experience, doesn’t mean that’s deeply what it is or something, it’s just how it feels.
Good. Now you may begin to notice something even a little more unexpected, which is that, within all this buzzy tingliness, these energy feelings, right inside that, there’s a sense of spaciousness—a real sense of openness, a real sense of boundlessness, right inside the energy. Doesn’t have to feel infinite or anything, it just feels open, because when we stop feeling the body as being like a tin can, and instead, the boundaries become indistinct, the boundaries aren’t there anymore.
So there’s a real open feeling in the body. These sensations of energy can have this sense of being sky-like or spacious. So we have this interesting transformation, transmogrification, Verwandlung, of the body as a mountain in the sky into the body as sky. Not as something we’re imagining, but just feeling that openness, that spaciousness, that boundlessness in the body itself. So that our quotidian little lump of human clay starts to feel like this vast, spacious, open, awakeness. That the sky outside and the sky inside are in fact just the sky, and that the crimped tight little cage that we tend to mentally box our body into is just now gone—it’s just wide open. It’s just free, it’s just awake space.
And again, another paradox, even though we got to the spaciousness through this energy flavor, this flavor of vibratory awakeness in this boundlessness, there’s a kind of deep, deep, stillness easily available. Tremendous stillness, bringing us back to a mountain-like flavor, but it’s the stillness of openness, the stillness of tremendous availability, the stillness of deep responsiveness. Just tune into that stillness that is so clear, deep, deep, stillness.
The stillness is not something we’re looking at—it’s not an object that you’re pointing attention on. The stillness is what we are. We’re just noticing, being the stillness. If we get caught up in thinking, that will make our awareness into a kind of pointed attention at an object. We’re looking at thoughts. But if we let go of those, and relax, we just become stillness, openness, awakeness.
Good. Now notice what’s underneath the stillness or inside the stillness. There is no ground there at all. It’s not that it’s nothing, because it’s not nothing, but there’s no thing there to hold onto. It’s spacious, it’s boundless. It’s spacious and boundless in every direction. There’s no floor, so that, in this stillness, and in this openness, you can’t find anything to hang on to at all.
At first that might feel a little uncomfortable, but this is the feeling of potential, this is the feeling of freedom, this is the feeling of fullness. It’s unbounded, so there’s nothing to hang on to. We can’t curl up here and become cozy in our cloaks. It’s open, it’s on board. So even though there’s this aspect of tremendous stillness, the potentiality of it, the unfixatedness of it, has this real sense of tremendous energy. And that energy becomes self and world in each moment. Self and world are not ever—even for an instant, even for a nanometer—separate from this groundless stillness. Pour forth out of it and return to it, again and again—never separate.
So feel the source becoming everything, becoming thoughts, becoming feelings, becoming the body, becoming the world. It’s right there. It’s not something you’re imagining. And then notice source pouring forth—this groundless stillness, pouring forth, pouring forth, becoming everything, including a sound. The sound of the seed syllable for earth, for manifestation, for Malkuth, for all this. So let’s manifest that sound from the very core of being the source of everything together.
[chanting] Lam, Lam, Lam
Staying wide open, just notice everything now, everything from the pile of rocks to the groundless source, and everything in between, and everything in all directions, and everyone in all directions. Ganesha is considered to be the lord of the ganas—of everything—the whole world, the whole universe. Oneness can be a concept, but it can also be an experience.
I feel like sitting quietly for a half hour now, but I told you guys the meditation would be an hour, so let’s end that there, and keep my promise.
These things now where I start talking are in these traditions often called a dharma talk, and in some ways of translating that that would be like a teaching talk. But in other ways of translating the same word it could be like a truth talk, and that feels a little a little presumptuous, so let’s just call it a ramble or a dramble or something like that.
I had a dream one time—years ago—about a new teaching called Vajra Drangle, maybe this is Vajra Drangle—it’s not regular Drangle, it’s Vajra Drangle—so you heard it here first.
Really often we are kind of stuck in our regular old conceptualizations of the world. Notice how little you actually ever experience anything except your own projections. We all tend to experience just our ideas about everything rather than things.
Just in general people do that, but our culture in particular really tends to do that. We’re much better at interacting with ideas than with our senses, and even when we’re interacting with our senses, we’re gathering up the sense data and 3D printing it into whatever ideas we want it to be. We just make it into stuff instead of really being there with it, and so that’s such a feature that, in these meditations, often we just kind of want to drop that, and let go of it, and blast off into just awakeness.
Hey, you guys, we’re just about to start kind of blast off into the stratosphere or whatever, but sometimes we want to start out with the groundedness, right? So having that thing tonight where we started out with just remembering the earth, remembering the ground, remembering the rocks, and just feeling a little more, and coming back there at the end.
Because in this way of working, we’re not trying to—at least in the long run—we’re not trying to blast off from the earth and leave it far behind and just keep going. You know—so long suckers—and just off into the heavens. Sometimes that’s a good move for a little while, to sort of like slip the surly bonds of earth, let go of our tight, constricted, crystallized concepts of everything, and start to really tune in to the openness, the spaciousness, the groundlessness, and all that. That is, for a lot of people, that’s the goal. But this is not the goal, right? This is just something to be aware of, that it isn’t just this screen of concepts that we’re interacting with, there’s really space, and awakeness, and deep, deep, profound, bottomless mystery there.
We’ve kind of forgotten that, and so sometimes you have to blast off from the normalcy to kind of tune into that, but in my opinion, if you stay there, you’re kind of half-baked, kind of half-cooked, right? Because you’ve now transcended, but you’ve left everything behind. So we always want to remember and come back to the experience, the life, the stuff, the others—who aren’t actually others—but still, all the wonderful others, with all the amazing differences. Back into all this, which is nothing other than that groundless, vast, outer space blasted offness made flesh, made manifest, made into something for a while. It’s not separate, it’s just different, right? It’s not some other thing, it’s just instead of being pure potential, it’s manifested.
It’s easy, if we don’t recognize that source, to kind of just go, “yeah he’s just talking about this, it’s just the world, that’s all just the world,” and have this kind of flatlander, materialist normalcy kind of attitude about it, and it’s like, No. That’s not what I said. That’s not it. That’s why sometimes we must recognize this other thing also. We must recognize the deep groundlessness of every part of everything. You know, the total magic of that, and the energy of that.
It’s often said, emptiness and form, emptiness and form, but it’s emptiness, form, and energy. There’s energy, and so we’re always playing with coming into the manifest, and then going into the potential, and coming in from the potential into the manifest, and back from the manifest into the potential. And the energy modulates between that. It’s the missing piece for a lot of work, noticing that you can work with the energy to move back and forth there. So this probably sounds like insanity or nonsense, I don’t know, but that’s what I feel like talking about.
So let’s just end there, and see if you guys have anything to say about your experience, or about what I’m talking about, or have any questions. Or maybe you just want to talk.
Questioner 1: It’s kind of half-baked, but…
Michael: You could be in the half-baked realm. [laughter]
Questioner 1: I’ve been noticing more and more the kind of vibrations that are always happening in my body, and I know somewhere out there is a book about frequencies and raising your frequency. I don’t know if this is related to that, but I guess I just wanted to hear a little bit more about your perspective on this.
Michael: Sure, this is something I find very interesting, which is that you almost never experience your body. That’s what I was saying. We’re so used to experiencing ideas that we’ve kind of forgotten how to actually experience something. And so we tend to experience our ideas of our body. And in our ideas of the body, it’s like a mechanism, and it has levers and pulleys, and pumps, and plumbing, and it has electrical wiring, and it’s got like a computer on top. And, you know, it’s sort of this amalgamation of stuff. It’s sort of like a leather doll filled with all this weird shit, right? And that’s how our mind works conceptually, and that’s what everyone is experiencing with their body.
Especially if you’ve got, let’s say, unhelpful ideas about your body, then you’re experiencing your body even through all these difficult ideas. So experiencing the body through the mind is what everyone’s doing, and it’s deeply dissociated.
Whereas, if you can learn to hang outside your thinking a little bit, and just feel your body, and you do it for a long time, something really weird starts to happen, which is you bump into these energy feelings. And then it’s like, I must have done something, and now this energy is happening, but after having done this for a long ass time—way too long—you realize, no, you didn’t do something to make energy happen, that’s just what the body is. Or, to put it differently, that’s what it feels like when you’re not thinking about it. You’re actually feeling it. The body—to put it in a funny way—that’s how the body experiences itself, is as a cloud of energy—really alive energy. There’s no parts; there’s no wiring; there’s no plumbing; there’s no chunks of anything. Even the bones are just vibrating energy. It’s all just—to itself—it experiences itself as vibrating energy.
So you can find 17 and a half quintillion theories about how to work with that, and what it is, and layers of frequencies, and all that—and that’s all cool, I mean, I like that stuff—but it’s all more ideas about it. It’s more ways to think about it. And it’s like, what if you just come back to how it feels, right? Just what does it feel? Instead of, what does the book tell you—it’s divided. You know what I mean? And so, I find this endlessly fascinating. It’s also deeply empowering, right? To come back to our actual—it’s almost like the body gets colonized by the mind. And the mind makes the body speak its language, and the native language of the body gets lost. And so, when we sit there, and just get outside our heads, we remember that language—because it’s our language—it’s the original language of the body. And it starts to talk to us like that. It’s very interesting—and no book will ever say it.
Questioner 1: Thank you.
Questioner 2: Hi. I really like the groundless stillness that you said. My question is that sometimes I feel that I could feel some people’s energy is very strong, or just, like, my idea of their energy is very strong, associated with their social status, or financial, or whatever, spiritual practice. So I get intimidated. I can acknowledge how I feel, but sometimes, some ideas, oh, can I hold the container to still interact with them in a natural way? I found it kind of difficult. Do you have any guidance on when that happens, how to navigate it?
Michael: Yeah, so you started out talking about the groundless stillness, and then you talked about the energy, right? And we all feel that, I guess, I can’t speak for everyone, but many people feel that different people have different sorts of energy. And some of the times it’s really strong, and that can be sometimes hard to deal with.
But you started out with the groundless stillness, and I’ll add spaciousness, and what’s interesting is, the groundless, still, spaciousness can handle any amount of energy. It is the source of all the energy, right? So that thing that you felt inside yourself, which is, like, instead of a container, it’s like the uncontained—can’t be bowled over, or overwhelmed, or wiped out, or somehow made small by someone else’s big energy, right? Because it’s vastly bigger, but it’s also not separate.
So, if you can notice that at any moment, even though, here you are in your human form, and all that, there’s also this groundless, vast, deep mystery within you. You can sit there with anything, right? Because it’s not hitting you. So that’s how I would recommend doing it.
Questioner 2: Thank you.
Michael: It also allows you to connect, because there’s a groundless vastness over there, too, and you just meet in the groundless vastness. It’s always a homecoming. It’s always non-confrontational, okay?
Questioner 3: I don’t know if this is a super well-definfined, question, but when you were cueing us at the beginning to adopt a sky-like mind, the way I interpreted that was, instead of like, you know, normally I walk around with the humming the guy up here, I was trying to like project my sense of self out into the perceptual field.
Michael: Yeah, don’t do that.
Questioner 3: Oh, okay. I liked it, and I wanted to ask you why I liked it.
Michael: You like it, I think, because it does break the sense of being a homunculus stuck inside a little bucket. So it does have that spaciousness. But the reason I say don’t do that is because you’re
Questioner 3: …you’re still keeping the sense of being a self, not like just deconstructing it, or dissolving it?
Michael: That’s true, and it’s not like, oh, that’s a bad thing, don’t do it, because in some traditions, you do do it, and it does do some cool stuff. But I would just say, I’m more trying to get you to notice that if you drop the idea that you’re a homunculus stuck in a little head bucket. It’s just an idea. The minute you drop it, you are spacious. You don’t need to project anything anywhere. That’s what I mean. Often in the guidance, I’m saying don’t imagine anything, don’t imagine anything, because of that. This is already here. But it’s certainly a practice to notice what’s behind your head right now. Without imagining anything, if you don’t imagine anything, all there is is a bunch of black space. Now jump out the back of your head, right? That’s the same move that you’re describing. It’s a very traditional move, and cool things happen.
Questioner 3: Okay, thanks.
Michael: Yep. Other stuff?
Questioner 4: You mentioned waves, and sometimes I feel it, and I’m like, Oh that’s my aorta, I’m feeling the heart. Then later on, you mentioned breath, and I’m like, it was my breath that I’m counting. How many per minute. I’m trying to dissect what you were saying, like a part of my body is giving that wave. I feel like that’s going to come up every time I meditate. Can you talk about this wave, or is it actually…It’s not an organ, I’m guessing?
Michael: Well, who knows what it is? But the thing you’re doing is grabbing onto thinking about it, right? Instead of just experiencing the wave, you’re like, What is it? And now I’m going to have an idea, oh, but wait, what is it now? I’m going to have an idea. That’s what I’m talking about, not doing, to the best of your ability. Just set that aside, it can sit there and think that, but you’re just not paying attention to that part, and instead, feel in the wave, and then feel the wave, and then feel the wave—instead of thinking about the wave, thinking about the wave.
Questioner 4: Okay.
Michael: We can talk a lot about what it might be, and all that—and that’s cool, right? That’s fun. That’s interesting. It’s probably important for future science, you know. I mean there’s interesting stuff there, but when you’re meditating, we want to let go of that entirely. This is more ideas, the mind’s ideas about the body, and we’re just going to just drop that to the best of our ability, and just feel, just feel, just feel. Because, most of the time—not you, but just most of us—are using those ideas to not feel. It’s intentional, and so we have to relax that part, and see if we can just come into the somatic, right? Does that make sense?
Questioner 4: Okay.
Michael: Okay, let’s come on back, then to the part I promised, which is the silent, unguided, meditation, which will be five-six minutes kind of thing—or maybe an hour.
[silent meditation]
Okay, thanks everybody. Good night.
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